DAVE EGGERS
On the night of January 19, 1960, Manuel Valtierra was murdered in Chicago. The police suspected that his brother-in-law, Danny Escobedo, might have pulled the trigger, given that Escobedo’s sister, Grace, claimed that Valtierra had abused her. Escobedo was arrested a few hours after the shooting and was brought in for questioning. He said nothing substantial to the police and was released that day. On January 30, Benedict DiGerlando, also a suspect in the killing, told the police that Escobedo had fired the fatal shots, and Escobedo was brought in again on January 30.
Once at the precinct, Escobedo told the police that he wanted his lawyer, Warren Wolfson, present during any interrogation. The police refused. Escobedo’s mother called Wolfson, notifying him of Escobedo’s arrest. Wolfson arrived at the precinct and made his presence known to the sergeant on duty. The sergeant refused to allow him to see Escobedo. At one point, Wolfson caught sight of Escobedo as he was being interrogated, but police still did not grant him the right to speak to his client until, they said, they “were done” with him. Meanwhile, during the interrogation, Escobedo repeatedly asked to have his counsel present, but police told him that Wolfson did not want to see him. During their interrogation of Escobedo, detectives extracted what they claimed was a confession, and at trial, Escobedo was convicted of murder.
Escobedo appealed this conviction, and the case wound its way to the Supreme Court, with Bernard Weisberg arguing for the ACLU with Walter T. Fisher. The Court decided, 5–4, in Escobedo’s favor, noting that the Constitution guarantees a defendant the right to a lawyer, and thwarting that right during interrogation defeats the entire purpose of that right. “The guiding hand of counsel,” the Court wrote, was most crucial at this most delicate part of the criminal justice process. In the end, the conviction was overturned and the precedent in Escobedo v. Illinois, decided in 1964, established the right of any suspect to have a lawyer present during police questioning. In their ruling, made in the thick of the Cold War, the Court also noted that “the Soviet criminal code does not permit a lawyer to be present during an investigation. The Soviet trial has thus been aptly described as ‘an appeal from the pretrial investigation.’ ”
Escobedo v. Illinois brought necessary progress that improved the criminal justice system. A few years later, Miranda v. Arizona established what we now know as our Miranda rights, which must be read to anyone being arrested prior to questioning and which include the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney. Miranda built on, and in a way supplanted, Escobedo. Thereafter, not only did a suspect have a right to an attorney during interrogation, but police had to inform the suspect of these rights during the arrest. All of this was positive and long overdue.
And yet.
And yet we still have widespread, even epidemic, problems with forced confessions. According to the Innocence Project, one out of every four defendants whose convictions were later overturned using DNA evidence were originally convicted through false or forced confessions. And the problem is diabolical. Even when innocent suspects know their rights, they often agree to answer questions without an attorney present because they know they are innocent. They want to be helpful. They feel they have nothing to hide. And they don’t want to appear guilty by hiring a lawyer.
And thus they answer questions and are frequently tricked or pressured into a confession. Sometimes they’re interrogated so long—on average, interrogations last sixteen hours—that they’ll say anything to leave the room and go to sleep. Sometimes detectives simply lie to them, claiming evidence they actually don’t have, or they fabricate witnesses who implicate them in the crime. And then there are the instances of force, or the threat of force. And the instances of the suspect being too young or otherwise mentally unable to understand the nature of an interrogation and the gravity of what might be self-incrimination.
Culturally, we have to change our thinking about interrogations. Every police procedural on television and film glamorizes these interrogations and implicitly approves of what are undeniable human abuses and violations of the Constitution. Suspects are kept chained to chairs, are denied food and water, are kept under hot lights, and are pitted against friends and family. They are deceived and intimidated. They are told that their conviction is assured, and their punishment will be far worse unless they confess. And all the while, audiences are expected to approve because the detectives, certain of the suspect’s guilt, simply need to get to the desired result, conviction, with a minimum of interference. This makes for good and satisfying entertainment but represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the rights of suspects in a free society.
As a nation, we still, nearly sixty years after Escobedo v. Illinois, look askance at anyone who asks for an attorney before speaking with police. We still see this as some kind of admission of guilt. Why would an innocent person need a lawyer? we ask. This attitude must change. Waiting until an attorney is present must be seen as an act of wisdom—an acknowledgment of the wisdom of the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments—rather than evidence of guilt.
And after we achieve that, we have more changes ahead: all interrogations must be electronically recorded to be valid; interrogations must be limited to a reasonable amount of time (a study by the Center on Wrongful Convictions and the University of California-Irvine found that 84 percent of false confessions occurred after interrogations of more than six hours); and interrogators should be prohibited from lying to suspects—presenting false evidence, false witnesses, and false scenarios involving leniency if the suspect confesses.
We have a ways to go to make the system better and to prevent the towering moral offense of wrongful conviction. But Escobedo was a landmark case that no doubt prevented thousands of innocent men and women from being railroaded into self-incrimination. “We have learned the lesson of history, ancient and modern,” Justice Goldberg wrote in the majority opinion, “that a system of criminal law enforcement which comes to depend on the ‘confession’ will, in the long run, be less reliable and more subject to abuse than a system which depends on extrinsic evidence independently secured through skillful investigation.”